Fetal Protection Laws: Moral Panic and the New Constitutional Battlefront
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California Law Review Vol. 102 August 2014 No. 4 Copyright © 2014 by California Law Review, Inc., a California Nonprofit Corporation Fetal Protection Laws: Moral Panic and the New Constitutional Battlefront Michele Goodwin* Increasingly, state statutes are the primary means through which legal norms affecting low-income pregnant women’s autonomy, privacy, and liberty are introduced and shaped. Arrests, forced bed rests, compelled cesarean sections, and civil incarcerations of pregnant women in Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, New Mexico, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin merely scratch the surface of a broad attack on pregnant women. This recent era of maternal policing reshapes physician and police interactions with pregnant women accused of violating fetal protection laws (FPLs); inspires (and sometimes requires) medical officials to breach confidentiality when treating pregnant women; motivates selective prosecution against poor women, particularly Copyright © 2014 Michele Goodwin. * Professor of Law, University of California-Irvine. President, Defence for Children International-US. This project has benefited from workshops, symposia, and roundtables at Columbia Law School; University of Denver, Strum College of Law; Fordham Law School; Harvard Law School; Northwestern University School of Law; University of Chicago Law School; University of Iowa College of Law; UC Irvine School of Law; University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law; University of Miami School of Law; and London South Bank University, among others. This paper was presented at the Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting (January 2013), and as a plenary session at the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting. I am grateful for the many conversations building forth from this work, including with Adrienne Asch, Paul Butler, June Carbone, Mary Ann Case, Danielle Citron, Jessica Clarke, Glenn Cohen, Katherine Franke, Suzanne Goldberg, Tanya Hernandez, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Lynn Paltrow, Dorothy Roberts, Bertrall Ross, Harriet Washington, and Patricia Williams. This article benefited from the studious attention of Allison Whelan, Oleg Shik, and Jordon Greenlee, as well as research support of the UMN Law Library, including Michael Schubert and Suzanne Thorpe. I thank the California Law Review. 781 782 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 102:781 those of color; and evinces improper judicial deference to medical authority rather than law. This Article makes three claims. First, it argues that doctors breach what should be an unwavering duty of confidentiality to pregnant patients by trampling the well-established expectations of the patient-physician relationship. Second, it argues that even if states’ chief goal is to promote fetal health by enacting protectionist laws, punitive state interventions contravene that objective and indirectly undermine fetal health. Finally, the Article argues that FPLs unconstitutionally situate pregnant women as unequal citizens by unjustly denying them basic human and legal rights afforded other citizens. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 783 I. Implementation of State Law: The Shifting Role of Medical Personnel in Fetal Protection Law Cases.............................................. 795 A. States Increasingly Rely on Medical Personnel to Interpret State Statutes ................................................................................. 798 1. Samantha Burton’s Involuntary Bed Rest .............................. 799 2. Christine Taylor’s Arrest for Tripping While Pregnant ......... 806 3. Rennie Gibbs’s Charge of Depraved Heart Murder in Stillbirth Case .......................................................................... 808 B. Medical Staff Are Poor Interpreters of Law, and This New Focus on Law Compromises Their Medical Judgment ................ 812 1. Marlise Muñoz: Brain-Dead Pregnant Woman Kept on Life Support to Incubate Fetus ................................................ 814 2. Angela Carder: Denying a Pregnant Patient Chemotherapy .. 815 II. The Fiduciary Relationship, Criminal Leverage, and Medical Utility .................................................................................................... 818 A. The Fiduciary Relationship in Common Law: A Bundle of Principles, Obligations, and Rights ............................................... 820 B. Formidable Discretionary Power: FPLs Lead to the Corruption of the Physician-Patient Relationship ........................................... 824 C. Enlistment of Doctors to Police Pregnant Patients: Inimical to Public Health Goals ....................................................................... 829 1. Driving Women away from Needed Medical Care ......... 830 2. Decline In Trust: Undermines Health Goals and Outcomes .......................................................................... 833 3. Shackling Further Undermines Pregnant Patients’ Health ............................................................................... 835 III. The Equal Protection Conundrum ........................................................ 839 A. The Empirical Problem ................................................................. 840 1. Abstracted Legal and Medical Framing ........................... 841 2014] FETAL PROTECTION LAWS 783 2. The Multi-Headed Hydra: Environment and Poverty ..... 843 3. The “Crack Baby” Myth .................................................. 845 4. Fetal Health Versus Business Interests: Alcohol and Tobacco ............................................................................ 849 5. The Scapegoat: Retribution and Punishment ................... 853 B. Equal Protection and Pregnancy ................................................... 856 1. Geduldig v. Aiello: An Equality Hurdle? ........................ 859 2. Fetal Protection and the Workplace ................................. 863 3. Means, Ends, and Chilling Prenatal Conduct .................. 868 4. State Action and Stereotypes ........................................... 872 Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 875 INTRODUCTION Imagine a time when fetal protection legislation emboldens a state’s attorney to prosecute a pregnant woman for smoking a cigarette.1 On the one hand, inhaling nicotine and carcinogens undoubtedly risks both pregnant women’s health and that of their fetuses.2 On the other hand, cigarette smoking is otherwise a rigorously defended legal activity. State governments persistently choose not to ban cigarette smoking, despite concerns for public health and safety and ongoing civil litigation against tobacco companies. But does the state’s asserted special solicitude for fetal health justify prosecuting pregnant women for smoking, and would such prosecution pass constitutional muster? When the state chooses to prosecute a pregnant woman for threatening fetal health, it raises a host of questions. Under what circumstances and justifications does it do so? Why does some conduct during pregnancy and not others raise red flags and lead to punitive state interventions? What do these choices signify regarding the exercise of prosecutorial discretion? How should we assess the constitutionality of these prosecutorial choices? 1. Press Release, Nat’l Advocates for Pregnant Women, Supreme Court of New Mexico Strikes Down State’s Attempt to Convict Woman Struggling with Addiction During Pregnancy (May 11, 2007), available at http://www.advocatesforpregnantwomen.org/whats_new/victory_in_the_new _mexico_supreme_court_1.php (reporting that, during oral arguments before the Supreme Court of New Mexico, the state’s attorney admitted that the law used to prosecute Cynthia Martinez’s drug addiction during her pregnancy “could potentially be applied to pregnant women who smoked.”). 2. See, e.g., Jane Blood-Siegfried & Elizabeth K. Rende, The Long-Term Effects of Prenatal Nicotine Exposure on Neurologic Development, 55 J. MIDWIFERY & WOMEN’S HEALTH 143, 143 (2010) (“Exposure to cigarette smoking is one of the most modifiable causes of morbidity and mortality for both the mother and fetus.”); K.O. Haustein, Cigarette Smoking, Nicotine and Pregnancy, 37 INT’L J. CLINICAL PHARMACOLOGY & THERAPEUTICS 417, 417 (1999) (discussing numerous risks of smoking during pregnancy, including higher incidence of spontaneous abortion, premature ablation placentae, physical deformities, and sudden infant death syndrome); Richard L. Naeye, Influence of Maternal Cigarette Smoking During Pregnancy on Fetal and Childhood Growth, 57 OBSTETRICS & GYNECOLOGY 18, 20 (1981) (finding that infants of smokers are smaller at birth than infants of nonsmokers). 784 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 102:781 These questions are important because state statutes are increasingly the primary means through which medical and constitutional norms, including selective invasions of privacy, disclosures of medical information, arrests, prosecutions, and convictions relating to pregnancies are introduced and shaped.3 A recent report issued by Lynn Paltrow, Executive Director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), and Professor Jeanne Flavin underscores this point. The authors document over four hundred cases from 1973 to 2005 “in which a woman’s pregnancy was a necessary factor leading to attempted and actual deprivations of a woman’s physical liberty.”4 Their account of fetal protection interventions on pregnant